Sanitation is a critical feature in any society, as it is a requirement for providing desirable living conditions. Sanitation being improperly performed can and does lead to sickness and even death on a massive scale. To this end, the disposal of garbage from commercial establishments, residential homes and apartment houses is generally handled by garbage trucks equipped to handle garbage bins. These trucks have the capability of lifting the bins and dumping the contents thereof into a compactor from where the compacted trash is pushed by a ram into the back of the truck for dumping. Particularly in the case of restaurants and apartment houses where the trash contains a considerable amount of organic material, the garbage bins may become unpleasantly odorous, even after having been emptied, and can present a health problem.
The current solutions for washing and disinfecting garbage bins are largely unacceptable. Manually washing and disinfecting garbage bins can be time consuming and tedious for a person to perform, as well a labor intensive. Automated processes may be employed, such as through the use of tank trucks equipped with a hoisting device and a separate pump unit adapted to provide water jets for sprinkling the interior walls of the garbage bin, with the bin being suspended from the hoisting device. The automated processes, however, are usually limited in scope as the tank truck and hoisting device are usually limited to garbage bins of a particular size, thereby leaving a large amount of garbage bins of differing sizes unattended. Conventional automated processes for washing and disinfecting garbage bins can also leave many interior areas of a garbage bin being untouched, with a large proportion of the dirt stubbornly adhering on the garbage bin walls. The known automated processes may also use exorbitant amounts of water per garbage bin, thereby resulting in large amounts of water waste. Conventional automated processes for washing and disinfecting garbage bins may further cause runoff of the wastewater into the environment, which can be damaging.
Furthermore, some of the conventional automated processes for washing and disinfecting garbage bins are inefficient, as they require one or more separate gas engines to power the water pumps that provide pressurized water to the spraying system. The requirement of additional engines introduces inefficiencies into the system, including additional maintenance requirements for the additional engines, additional fuels costs, additional points of failure that increase downtime of the system, and additional repairs. These inefficiencies increases overall cost and time requirements for said conventional automated processes and are therefore disadvantageous.
Therefore, a need exists for improvements over the prior art, and more particularly for improved systems and apparatuses for quickly and efficiently performing a proper cleaning and disinfecting regimen for garbage bins.